Gold and silver metallic temporary tattoo designs of mandalas, paisley and lace bands, shown on a bare back and a forearm and on a flash sheet.

Metallic gold henna-style temporary tattoos

Back · Colour · Flash

A collage with a flash sheet of metallic gold and silver temporary tattoo designs, including mandalas, paisley motifs, filigree bands and vertical ornamental strips. Two photographs show the designs on skin: one on the upper back beneath strands of beads, and one on a forearm and wrist. The linework is fine and decorative with solid metallic fills, and the palette is gold and silver on a pale background.

Back Forearm Mandala Paisley Lotus Filigree Henna Bracelet Necklace Bead Chain Ornament

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dev had been selling the gold sheets from a folding table under the railway arches on Sorrel Road for three summers, and he knew his customers by their wrists. Nobody bought the mandala. They wanted the thin filigree bands, the strips you could wind twice round a forearm and forget. The mandala sat at the top of every sheet, grey-silver and too big for anyone's skin, and he kept it there because his mother had once drawn one on the back of his hand in henna before school.

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The tower block at Kestle Point stood behind the stall, fourteen floors of washing lines. On Thursdays a woman called Mrs Oduya came down in the lift with a carrier bag and bought one gold strip, always the same, paying in coins she counted onto the table. She never asked for the mandala. Last month she asked whether he could do the big one for her grandson's arm, and he said the adhesive would not hold on a moving wrist. She laughed and said nothing in her building held still.

Then the lift broke and stayed broken. On Saturday Dev carried the stock up the stairs himself, fourteen flights with a box of transfers held against his chest, and found her door open on the ninth floor. The grandson sat on the lino with a torch and a sheet of paper, tracing a mandala onto his own arm in biro, lips moving as he counted the petals.

Dev peeled the top sheet from the pile, cut the big mandala out with the scissors from his pocket, and pressed it to the boy's wrist with a flannel wrung out in warm water. Thirty seconds, then the paper came away. The lotus stayed, gold and grey, a little crooked, and the boy held his arm up to the window as if the whole block had been waiting to see it.